1 Jan, 2011: The Thirteenth Grape

I awoke this New Year's morning to a red sky and felt grateful to be a landlubber. I was up early to hug my son and daughter-in-law farewell following a short and welcomed visit. They were headed out the door in sober finery, leaving for a New Year's Day funeral in NC for a man in his eighties who had committed suicide because he had been in terrible pain from cancer for far too long. If it doesn't occur to you that this is a hell of a way to start a new year, you're lying.

All over America today, we'll be eating peas for luck and greens for money, pork for prosperity and seafood for fertility. If the fireworks and noisemakers were loud enough at midnight, we'll have driven the devils away for the coming year. In some homes, nothing will be removed from the house all day, not even a bulging plastic trash bag, lest the coming year be spent mourning loss. And no laundry or dish washing unless you want to be responsible for seeing a loved one wash away. Homespun voodoo layered with longing.

In Spanish cultures, twelve grapes are eaten quickly as the clock strikes midnight, each grape representing one month of the year. If the third grape is sour, March will be a difficult month and a dropped grape portends disaster. Sounds to me like a situation ripe for a no-notice demonstration of the Heimlich Maneuver. The Peruvians, bless their optimism, cover their bets by insisting on a thirteenth grape for good luck. Does the thirteenth grape trump a tart September or a fumbled February? Just askin'.

And right now we're all thinking how silly these rituals sound, how superior to superstition we are today, how we're only going to choke down our turnip greens or our collards because...because...um, it's traditional.  But I am most struck by the helplessness implied in these practices--a helplessness that resonates for many of us today.

2010 was a year that even the sanest and most rational of us had to write off to voodoo: I'm reminded of Dire Straits' lyric, "money for nothing and your chicks for free." We were expected to believe that we could only move forward by scrambling backward on social policy, that deficits only matter during campaigns, that Americans really want their old health care back, that BP had done its best, that anyone who really wanted a job could find one, that Michelle Obama wants to force raw broccoli down our kid's throat, and that Christine O'Donnell is not a witch.

Today, I'm sorry to say that I cannot imagine how we'll find our way to health, to real community, to fiscal solvency, to troop withdrawal, to energy responsibility, to accountability in government. And yet we must. We must, despite our national exhaustion and soured mood, our generational weariness, our confusion. We must because we are not the last ones standing. 2010 birth rates are not yet calculated, but preliminary counts show there were 4,131,019 babies born in the US in 2009.

We must because we're the grown-ups.

Typical of me, I've been reading, looking for the wise men and women who'll point the way. There's lots to read, but no clear winners--just erudite arguments. The headlines tell the story.

Economic Optimism? Yes, I'll Take That Bet , John Tierney, NYTimes, 12/27/2010

The New Voodoo , Paul Krugman, NYTimes, 12/30/2010

Was It Really So Bad?, Michael Elliott, TIME, 11/2010

Why 2011 Will Be A Happier New Year, Fareed Zakaria, TIME, 12/28/2010 

Eat, Pray, Love And Other Resolutions For 2011, Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, January 2, 2011

More Stimulating Than The Stimulus: In 2010 we learned that many of us are Neanderthals, George Will, Newsweek, January 1, 2011

Veterans of recent wars confront grim employment landscape, Michael Fletcher, Washington Post, Dec 30, 2010

Yesterday was DH's sixty-sixth birthday. He's my hero, by the way. As I'm writing, I'm aware of a flurry of activity in the house. I ask what he's doing and learn that he's changing all the air filters in the house because New Year's Day is a good day for stuff like that. Because it's important to do something.

With this first post of the year, I want to open a particular and very personal discussion, one that you might want to take up in your own blogs. Many of us feel stalled out, stuck because things aren't the way we thought they'd be at this point in our lives. It has finally sunk in that the economy won't be springing blythely back, after all. That the wacko political reactionaries didn't just go away. That no one is sure how we'll restore adequate jobs to our people. We feel angry. We feel cheated. We want to blame someone. And we sense that it's time to get beyond that state.

How shall we personally respond, rather than react, to the daunting conditions we face?
Where will our personal hope, our energy and our will come from?
How will we rise above our personal discouragement and contribute constructively?
How should we live now?

If there was ever a new year that warranted a thirteenth grape, it's 2011.

P.S. A self-administered quiz: Did you open any of the headline links? If not, why not? If you did, which did you open first?